UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

One million children in Gaza are living in dire conditions. Many celebrated Eid in the dark without electricity. A UN report in 2012 said Gaza would be unlivable by 2020. Save the Children considers Gaza to be unlivable now.

A United Nations report published two years ago warned that Gaza would become unlivable by the year 2020, but a new UN report finds that the deterioration in conditions there has worsened faster than expected. The Red Cross has also warned that a “systemic collapse of an already battered infrastructure and economy is impending.” In a recent article, Dr. Alice Rothchild, a physician who is active with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP,) wrote:

The steady deterioration of the lives of the people in Gaza in the face of occupation, siege, internal discord, and the willful blindness of the international community can only be described as a not so slow genocide that is obvious to anyone who chooses to see.

JVP, including the group’s Rabbinical Council, has consistently expressed solidarity with the people of Gaza. Progressive Jewish rabbis have joined Palestinian Christians in calling on U.S. churches to take meaningful actions to protest Israeli policies towards the Palestinians. A number of U.S. churches have already answered the Palestinian Christian call— contained in the historic Kairos Palestine document, for solidarity with the Palestinian people.

It is now high time for U.S. church leaders to head the call of their Palestinian Christian brothers and sisters and take a courageous public stand for peace and justice in the Holy Land.

In 2012 the UN Country Team produced a report on living conditions in Gaza and predicted that based on the trends we were seeing then, Gaza was on track to become ‘unliveable’ by 2020. Sadly, as we check-in on those same trends again in this 2017 report, the deterioration has accelerated, spedalong not least by a devastating round of hostilities in 2014 from which we are only now starting to recover. In my fortnightly visits to Gaza I am constantly amazed at the resilience of a people who manage to get by despite such odds. For most of us, with electricity only 2 hours a day as was the case recently, and youth unemployment at 60%, the ‘unliveability’ threshold has already been passed.